Fragments. A Mass. A Plan.

(1)

FRAGMENTS. A MASS.

A PLAN.

By Jerrod Maddio

11313862-June 2018

(2)

1

Introduction:

The Matter of Violence

Someone will remember us I say

Even in another time -Sappho (Fragment 147) i

Over 2,000 years after Sappho had crafted the words which serve as the epigraph to this piece, Friedrich Schlegel wrote in his Critical Fragments that “Sapphic is never cynical” (Schlegel 48 CF 119)1. While he was, of course, referring to the poetic form of the Sapphic ode, and not to Sappho as a person, the pairing of these voices gives a sense of satisfaction that may well be described as “serendipitous.” The ancient poet uncynically prophecies that she (and some unfortunately lost other) will be remembered; Schlegel, through acknowledging her poetic forms, fulfills that prophecy, though only partially, for the unnamed other remains lost. The partial, it seems, characterizes both of these authors, though in radically divergent ways. For, while Schlegel was writing about Sappho’s original poetic forms, he was in that moment (1797) attempting to write in what, at the time, seemed like a wholly new form: the form in which Sappho’s poems would be discovered precisely a century later (1897) during the excavation of an ancient rubbish heap in Egypt; that is to say, Schlegel was attempting to write in fragments.

Indeed, the name of this thesis, which invokes the fragment directly, is taken from one of Schlegel’s Critical Fragments, specifically number 103, the relevant portion of which reads, “many a work of art whose coherence is never questioned is, as the artist knows quite well himself, not a complete work but a fragment, or one or more fragments, a mass, a plan” (Schlegel 12 CF 103). What Schlegel here posits rather nebulously in the earliest of his “fragmentary” collections would eventually become a defining tenet of the so-called Deutsche Frühromantik (Early German Romanticism). Indeed, Schlegel attempted to make the concept of the fragment, never before regarded as worthy of a critical theory, the defining quality of Romantic art itself, and, while its importance has become obscured by better-known attributes more typical of Romantic writing, such as transcendentalism or the sublime2, fragmentation nonetheless remained an indispensable quality of much German Romantic writing, particularly

(4)

3

that of Schlegel and Novalis. But, rather than a rigorously formulated concept that could explain art, the fragment (or fragmentation, rather) remained merely a quality of its production.3

Unfortunately for the fragment and its later theorists, Schlegel’s practice of attempting to write fragments did not result in a rigorously critiqued, well-defined concept of “the fragment” or “fragmentation”, and indeed Schlegel’s deployment of these terms is at least inconsistent, if not outright incautious. In his Athenaeum Fragments, he claims that “[a] fragment, like a miniature work of art, has to be entirely isolated from the surrounding world and be complete in itself like a porcupine” (Schlegel 45 AF 206). This assertion seems immediately problematic to anybody with even a basic knowledge of Latin. For the word is indeed Latin in origin and, in German as in English, the “fragment” is explicitly defined on the principal of having been broken: of being a part which was violently detached from a whole. The Oxford English Dictionary, for example, cites the following definitions: “fragment: (n) 1. A part broken off or otherwise detached from a whole; a broken piece; a (comparatively) small detached portion of anything;” or else, “fragment: (v. trans. intr.) To break or separate into fragments.”4 Etymologically, “fragment” originates from the Latin verb frangere: “to break,” a derivation notable for at least two reasons: the first being the obvious (i.e. that a fragment in this old sense implies a breakage, and not merely incompletion); and the second being that this noun, “fragment,” is derived from a verb, “frangere,” and thus implies the status of the fragment as something which must result from a process: something which cannot be thought without keeping this process in mind: a process which fundamentally alters the form. While positing a practice of the fragment as the quintessence of Romantic literature, Schlegel fails to make use of the most critical semantic entailment adhering to the fragment itself: breakage, violence.

Thus, while Schlegel may indeed be “undoubtedly the most important theorist of the fragment” (Verstraete 2), insofar as he has contributed the most to making the fragment a conceptual object with an ostensible critical function, his peculiar and inconsistent deployment of the term warrants attention and improvement. For, while it is more than fair to argue for the value of polysemy and malleable concepts, it is also true, as Mieke Bal writes, that:

“[c]oncepts… can be tremendously productive. If explicit, clear, and defined, they can help to articulate an understanding, convey an interpretation, check an imagination-run-wild, or enable a

(5)

4

discussion, on the basis of common terms and in the awareness of absences and exclusions” (Bal 23).

The motivation to approach the fragment with such a formalizing intention arises from the desire to understand more rigorously both Schlegel’s writings and the nature of fragmentation, but not necessarily from a need to reconcile the two; for, as Wojciech Hamerski notes, “incomprehensibility is not something that happens to [Schlegel’s] texts unintentionally, but is rather their main subject and decided creative principle” (Hamerski 9). Additionally, Schlegel himself writes that, “[philosophy] is the real homeland of irony” (Schlegel 5 CF 42). Somewhat ironically, then, taking Schlegel at his word here means that Schlegel cannot always be taken precisely at his word. There is always a reason to re-probe his writings from fresh angles.

Additionally, Schlegel seems to have believed that “[t]he best way not to be understood or, rather, to be misunderstood, is to use words in their original meanings, especially words from the ancient languages” (Schlegel 20 AF 19). Undoubtedly there is some irony in Schlegel’s words, but it is nonetheless clear that, in his writings from 1797-1800, Schlegel avoids using the term “fragment” in its etymological sense, and indeed contrasts his theoretical development of the fragment directly against its original meaning. It can thus be reasoned (if one is prepared to believe Schlegel at least in his call for irony) that, while Schlegel’s writings may contain a reflection on fragmentation, they are not themselves fragments as he claims, leaving one to wonder what exactly they are and do, and what exactly a concept of fragmentation that does not attempt to accommodate them might look like.

This study, then, is largely an endeavor to work through Schlegel’s conception of the fragment using texts both ancient and modern as objects against which his formulations can be set or tested. The hope is to refine the valuable, but inconsistent and diffuse, concept exposited by Schlegel (and the Romantics generally) in order to salvage a more fundamental understanding of the fragment that re-introduces the notion of violence into its theorization, giving more meaningful parameters and critical force to a concept which does indeed seem to have “run-wild.”

(6)

5 ii

Any concept which is not rigorously theorized (in the sense of well-defined both in form and function5) runs the risk of becoming diffuse and meaningless. This can be the result of both under- and over-theorization (the latter of which leads to an often overly metaphorical and ever-attenuating relationship between a concept word and its original meaning). While Schlegel seems to have personally under-theorized the fragment, critics in his wake have sought commendably, if somewhat misguidedly, to incorporate his model into a conceptual definition of fragmentation which lies somewhere between his work and the denotational definition, and this attempt has in turn led to a type of over-theorization which takes perhaps too literally Schlegel’s assertion that “[m]any modern works are fragments as soon as they are written” (Schlegel 21 AF 24). Rodolphe Gasché, one of Schlegel’s most pre-eminent critics, seems to have noted the effect that this statement has had on critical theory in recent years, writing in his introduction to the Collected Philosophical Fragments of Schlegel,

“Just as theories of writing, and on the multiplicity of the text, have gained hold in the field of literary studies over the last two decades, so also has the assumption that an inescapable fragmentation has always already gotten the best of the idea of totality associated with the book, the oeuvre, the opus, and so on” (Gasché vii).

While Gasché seems to view this as a positive phenomenon resulting from the strength of Schlegel’s ideas, it could easily be seen as precisely the opposite: a generalizing of the concept which strips the word “fragment” of its important predicates and renders it meaningless as a theoretical tool6_.

Since the late 1900s, Literary Theory (and particularly deconstructive approaches) have noticed as much and have been especially harsh to the concept of the fragment. Camelia Elias, writing in what is perhaps the most comprehensive study of the fragment to date, notes that “…Derrida would say, there is no such thing as a fragment” (Elias 7)7_{. But this denial of the}

fragment as a form qua se is the result of applying Schlegel’s idea of the fragment, which lacks a rigorous definition, to post-structural notions like the Deleuzian rhizomatic text and the Derridean supplément, which are indeed useful theories for many types of literary analysis, but which are unhelpful, and even inadequate, for a theorization of the fragment proper, insofar as these are theories which posit only one level of systemic operation in the text. That is to say, these modern theoretical tools are conceptions of literature which assume that a work maintains the potential for infinite relationality (one is tempted to say infinite “intertextuality8_{”) by virtue}

(7)

6

of its content (i.e. writing: semantic information). If one thinks of a text as merely the sense extracted therefrom, or as the potential to extract some sense, then surely such schools of thought would be correct in claiming that there is no such thing as a fragment. But a text is always more than this. It is immanently material. It can be corrupted, broken, burned, or torn, as files, tablets, books, and papyri. It has multiple levels of systematicity, each of which is capable of meaning in a unique way. And while merely compromising the physical form of a text may not fully impede interpretation (i.e. meaning-making), it is nonetheless indisputable that there is a certain quality (and perhaps quantity) of meaning that is augmented by such fragmentation. There is meaning both inherent in, and exclusive to, forms as such.

The focus on fragmentation as a matter of form is by no means unique to the present analysis. Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht, for instance, had already considered some of the most essential formal questions of fragmentation in the early 2000s, writing,

“How do we know that something is a fragment? The term applies to any object that we identify as part of a larger whole, without implying, however, that this part of a larger whole was meant to be a metonymy, representing the whole. And how do we become aware of that whole to which the fragment belongs? We can certainly not perceive it because, by definition, it cannot be present together with the fragment. At the beginning there must be the intuition of a lack coming from the contemplation of an object that is present. […] [W]e presuppose, for any fragment deserving this name, a violent intervention that has caused the difference between the text […] intended by the author and the text that has come down to us” (Gumbrecht qtd. in Bär 32)9_.

But to talk about such a general corruption of textual forms does little if anything to help understand what that corruption is doing to the text as an object of not just aesthetic, but even social import, nor does it speak to how the violence that causes this fragmentation may be significant in the specificity of the mode, medium, and cultural milieu out of which it arises10. Indeed, the mere fact that a fragment can be created in a seemingly endless number of ways seems to make the means of its creation (i.e. the violence or breakage from which it results) irrelevant to its interpretation in the present, or to its future significance. However, if one follows (as Schlegel attempted to do) the aesthetic framework of Kant’s Critiques (in particular his third, the Critique of Judgment), then there is little need to focus on the source of the damage (or, in Gumbrecht’s words the “violent intervention”) as a physical event, as analysis should rather be focused on how that damage is manifested, cognized, and acted upon by a subject encountering the fragmented object: that is, analysis should focus on the violence done to the fragment as a logical event. Thus, if one assumes that the mode of violence is logical, or at

(8)

7

least translates perceptibly into a logical disruption of reading, the medium and historical situation of a fragmentary artefact remain relevant inasmuch as they affect a logical interpretation of that artefact as judged by a subject.

To make this somewhat more intelligible, the first chapter of this work deals with the question of Schlegel’s relationship to Kant’s theories, and how these theories contributed to the form of Schlegel’s writings, which have been called Romantic fragments. As a matter of analyzing how fragments manifest, this first chapter follows Gasché’s assertion that “[T]he theory of fragmentation is understandable… only if it is seen to derive [from], elaborate on, and enact a series of implications that follow from Kant's reflections on the presentability of ideas” (xi). These Kantian reflections orient a reading of Schlegel’s Romantic fragments in order to understand how the presentability of ideas helps to shape the form of Schlegel’s works.

As a matter of cognizing the Romantic fragments, this chapter critiques these writings in light of Kant’s notion that “nothing can be ascribed to the objects except what the thinking subject takes out of itself…” (Critique of Pure Reason 113), and attempts to show, through this idea, how Schlegel’s works are interpreted (one might even say “constructed”) by a reading subject, explaining this reading as a matter of systems of logic. As Peter Firchow explains, “one of the reasons why the fragments are fragmentary, ruins and not complete edifices, is that Schlegel wants us to intuit what might have been but never was, wants us to take the fragment and make of it a whole, take the ruin and reconstruct the edifice” (Lucinde 18). Firchow here alludes to what might be termed “logical systems” (that is, ways in which the mind logically organizes text to give it a systemic form (i.e. a form that has an intelligible semantic output) so that meaning may be extracted therefrom) as he hits upon the crucial notion that the role of the interpreting subject is integral to a reading of the fragments. However, his analysis is somewhat backwards; while his assertion is that it takes an imaginative creative act performed by an interpreting subject to make the fragments whole, the first chapter of this work will demonstrate that such an imaginative effort is rather demanded to make these writings “fragments” in any meaningful sense.

Especially important to such an analysis is Kant’s notion of subjective purposiveness, which can be described as the subject’s understanding of the causal relationship between the form of an object and the aesthetical idea that the object represents (Critique of Judgment). This chapter will demonstrate that, because a subjective purposive reading of Schlegel’s writings is always possible (since they were indeed written in a precise way for a precise

(9)

8

purpose) these writings are not, in and of themselves, fragments, but rather whole insofar as they fulfill the function for which their form was purposefully created (a purpose which will merit extensive analysis in this first chapter). Thus, this preliminary analysis of Schlegel’s work culminates in a questioning of his forms as precisely fragmentary, despite his novel (and fairly clever) attempt to propose that what these writings fragment is an imagined ideal, rather than any realized form. This analysis lays the groundwork for a juxtaposition of the logical system inhering to Schlegel’s Romantic form against the logic that a subject employs when reading and interpreting “classical fragments:” i.e. texts from classical antiquity which have come to modern readers in physically fragmented forms, which comparison is the (somewhat implicit) focus of the second chapter.

In order to make the difference in logical interpretation between Romantic and classical fragments clear, Chapter 2 of this work deals almost exclusively with the textual fragments of the classical Lesbian poet Sappho, who’s works have been preserved on papyrus and potsherds, as well as through citation by various ancient authors. The several forms in which her works survive offer insights as to the difference in subjective cognition between interpreting Schlegel’s writings and interpreting these classical fragments. Perhaps the most important notion to arise in this second chapter is the connection between subjective purposiveness and violence. That is, this chapter focuses heavily on the translation of a perceptible violence done to a text into a violence done to the logical system that a subject must use to interpret that text. The argument for separating Schlegel’s forms from the classical fragments in terms of logical interpretation comes not only from the physical fact of fragmentation that is evident in some of these classical texts, but rather from the notion that this violence is translated from the physical to the logical insofar as what is lost from the classical works in question is indispensable information contained in the form itself, information that reflects the various social functions or occasions at which each of these works was performed. Indeed, the form of the classical fragment is not “indispensable” as a matter of mimetic presentation (an aesthetic principle which the Romantics heavily criticized), but rather because the form itself, the meter and subject matter, were an integral part of the actual performing of such occasions as weddings, funerals, and more light-hearted symposia and concerts. Thus, while Schlegel’s works can be read as subjective purposive wholes, these classical fragments, being often indiscernible in their forms (that is, indiscernible as either odes, epithalamia, elegies, etc.), cannot be interpreted with the same type of subjective purposive understanding, and thus require a different logic for a reading thereof.

(10)

9

This second chapter closes with a deduction of two types of violence which can be understood as two ways of translating the physical violences suffered by the classical fragment into logical disruptions that make these violences intuitable11. These comprise, on the one hand, the subordination or destruction of a text’s logic; and, on the other hand, the irretrievability of the text as a work with a unique poetic valuation of a particular social function. These are termed the “logical” and “formal” violences, respectively, and are employed, in the final chapter, as the criteria for judging whether modern forms do or do not exhibit the hallmarks of fragmentation which distinguish these proper fragments from the whole works they once were. In other words, these violences distinguish fragmentation proper, as a logical intuition of violence done to an object, from “wholeness,” which is characterized by the subject’s ability to formulate a subjective purposive interpretation of the object in question.

Finally, the third chapter of this work examines a particularly modern textual form which both reflects the classical relationship between the social and the textual, and exhibits the basic formal elements of Schlegel’s Romantic fragments. The form in question is the hashtag, a convention for categorizing text as metadata on Twitter and other social media, which convention places a piece of text into social relations with other texts that purport to represent similar aesthetical ideas as symbolized in the meta-textual form12_{of the hashtag itself.}

Both for the sake of recognizability, and for the purpose of evincing a clear relationship between the social and the textual, the specific example of #MeToo is examined against the previously deduced criteria of violence in order to determine whether this social form is also susceptible to the same fragmentation as the classical text, or whether it might rather have a certain immunity to such fragmentation, as Schlegel’s texts do (in reality, though not necessarily in intention). There is also an emphasis on the notion of “translation” as it applies to translating between media (such as performance and text, or print and digital media) but also translating between the various logical system used to interpret these media. Far from merely summarizing the state of fragment studies in the modern era, this chapter seeks to glean new critical insights into what constitutes fragmentation by reading new forms of multi-layered textual systems against the literary forms which have heretofore been available for study.

An analysis spanning over two and a half millennia inevitably encounters a great variety of objects that all purport to belong to the same class. Undoubtedly, any study which aims to more tightly define the concept of fragmentation will have to exclude many objects which have historically laid claim to the name of “fragment.” However, such exclusions are no loss; rather,

(11)

10

there is much to be gained by imposing a critical, formal definition on a concept that has heretofore remained all too nebulous: practice without properly critical theory.

(12)

11

Chapter 1

What Schlegel Lacks: Negativity and the Romantic Fragment i

Any theoretical discussion of the fragment which hopes to make a legitimate and defensible point about the nature of this form must necessarily do so with respect to (that is, against the backdrop of) Friedrich Schlegel’s writings of the late 1790s. As Camelia Elias has noted (along with many others), Schlegel’s critical writings, “mark[ed] the beginning of theoretical investigations into the constitution of the fragment” (Elias 71). Indeed, his writings are seminal. But they are not necessarily propaedeutic, for, as has also been noted, Schlegel’s writings on the fragment never actually proposed any explicit “theory of the fragment” as such, and indeed they appear to have been rather problematically inconsistent. As Blanchot asserts, “[t]he fragments often appear to be for Schlegel ‘a complacent self indulgence [sic], rather than the attempt to elaborate a more rigorous mode of writing’” (qtd. in Gasché ix). Claims like Elias’s thus become somewhat problematic if one conceives of theorization in terms of logically systematizing knowledge in a descriptive way in order to deduce synthetic concepts of understanding, and not necessarily in terms of demonstrating these principles through practice.13 But it is precisely as a practical demonstration, rather than a formal elaboration, that Schlegel’s writings might be considered fragmentary. As Rodolphe Gasché frames it, “it is generally taken for granted that ‘fragmentation’ and ‘fragmentary writing’ capture the energy and effects of the disruption by writing, the complex of referrals, and the inner multiplicity constitutive of the text denuded in the destruction that is taking place” (ibid vii). In brief, Schlegel’s gamble was to perform, rather than explicate, his ideas and then to leave it to criticism to discover and elaborate upon their conceptual dimension.

The focus of this chapter will thus be on reaching an understanding of what Schlegel’s theoretical writings do as much as what they adduce, and then to distinguish their logic as a matter of function, rather than of content: that is, to view his “fragments14_{” as relational entities}

which attempt to generate a state of fragmentation, rather than descriptions of what that state might look like, or its interpretive consequences. For, if Schlegel’s fragments have had an impact on contemporary literary theory, this is not because they describe a consistent and logical philosophical position (which they decidedly do not), but rather because the informal, or perhaps incidental, nature of their inter-relations evinces a practice of thinking and writing that attempts to create, rather than explain, fragmentation.

(13)

12 ***

ii

Schlegel wrote his fragments mainly during the years 1797-1800, in the wake of Kant’s tripartite Kritik (1781-1790). The Romantics, generally, were conscious of the import of Kant’s works, and indeed, as Gasché writes in his introduction to Schlegel’s collected Philosophical Fragments, “the theory of fragmentation is understandable (that is, distinguishable in what it philosophically puts forward) only if it is seen to derive [from], elaborate on, and enact a series of implications that follow from Kant’s reflections on the presentability of ideas” (Gasché xi, emphasis added). This invites the question: “In what ways did Kant’s critiques make possible, or even call for, the Romantic project that Schlegel embodied in the fragments?” One answer seems to be that, until Kant offered a system of metaphysics which posited art as “purposive without a purpose15” (Critique of Judgment) and aesthetic apprehension as disinterested, it would’ve likely seemed unnecessary to “theorize” an art that examined the possibility of recovering that purpose through a mode of self-criticism (that is, a form which tests the possibility of arriving at its purpose by positing that purpose not as a form per se, but as the conscious subjective act of reflecting on the conditions of possibility for forms in general). It was this self-critical dimension which Schlegel most notably sought to add to his fragments through the use of irony, and it was this ironic dimension that Schlegel saw as necessitating an understanding of the fragments as precisely fragmentary. When Schlegel began to write his philosophical and critical fragments in the late 1790s, then, he was not merely philosophizing about a form, but creating the very form about which he was philosophizing. It thus seems imperative to begin with an examination of the Romantic fragment as a form in order to better understand the way in which it functions.

Superficially, Schlegel’s fragments appear to be merely a new terminological choice for pre-existing genres. Before Schlegel began writing his Lyceum Fragments (also known as his Critical Fragments), genres such as the aphorism and pensée were well know and could certainly be seen as formally similar to Schlegel’s fragments, even if Schlegel himself claimed that they were functionally quite distinct. In fact, “it is well established that Friedrich Schlegel introduced the form of the fragment into German literature after the strong impression he received from the publication in 1795 of Chamfort's Pensees, maximes et anecdotes,” (Gasché viii). Peter Firchow supports the formal comparison, writing in his introduction to Lucinde and

(14)

13

the Fragments, “the Lyceum Fragments…like Chamfort’s, tend to be brief and self-contained, very much in the manner of traditional aphorisms” (Lucinde 16, emphasis added).

The main distinction between Schlegel’s writings and the “Chamfortian style” was the way in which each numbered piece either did or did not (respectively) influence the other pieces of the collection in which it was situated. That is to say, it was a formal distinction only insofar as it was also a distinction of content; while Chamfort’s writings were all clearly self-contained, Schlegel’s offered the possibility of being combined and recombined in various ways due to their terminological consistency and their ideological disparity. As Firchow writes, “a number of the fragments refer back and forth to each other, and indeed often become comprehensible only when seen in their mutual relations” (Lucinde 16). Thus, while Chamfort’s writings are a collection of discreet particles, Schlegel’s ostensibly form, at least in principal if not quite in practice, a loose “system.”

Still, while Schlegel’s “system” (loosely defined) of fragments and the critical literature that followed them attempt to position said fragments as quite distinct from the “Chamfortian style,” it is undeniable that a good number of these so-called fragments do seem to manifest as aphorisms, pensées, and maxims, at least if one follows Elias in her assertion that “[t]he most common features of the aphorism are identified as brevity, isolation, wit, and ‘philosophy’…” (Elias 9). Athenaeum Fragment 206, for instance, exemplifies these four qualities superbly: “A fragment, like a miniature work of art, has to be entirely isolated from the surrounding world and be complete in itself like a porcupine16” (Schlegel 45 AF 206). This passage is clearly of the aphoristic form: it is brief, certainly; it is “philosophical,” situated as it is within Schlegel’s wider philosophical project; it is “witty” in both the common sense of pithy and in Schlegel’s more philosophical sense; and finally, it is self-sufficient, even using the words “isolated” and “complete” explicitly. But it is precisely in this call for completion-in-isolation that Schlegel reveals the paradox of his project. For, while this particular fragment may appear “isolated,” and may call for the isolation of fragments in general from the context around them, a fragment is, by definition, incomplete on some level. Either Schlegel is challenging this definitive quality, or else this prima facie challenge must contain its own hidden counterargument, redeeming AF 206 from its appearance as a careless addition to the fragments. Indeed, this latter seems to be the case, and AF 206 does appear to be redeemed by Schlegel’s notoriously ironic style.

(15)

14

For, despite what he claims in the above fragment, Schlegel virtually compels readers to compare and combine his fragments due to the way they are written. Critical Fragment 14 may serve as a neat illustration: “In poetry too every whole can be a part and every part really a whole” (Schlegel 2 CF 14)17_{. Here Schlegel adeptly performs his theory of the fragment}

rather succinctly, insofar as the “too” (“Auch,” in the German original) sets this clause up as the latter half of an unresolved pair, or rather a pair which resolves itself only when viewed in the context of Schlegel’s entire oeuvre18_{. If one were to remove this “too,” the lone fragment}

would become a mere aphorism, and not a particularly interesting one at that. Instead, this formulation demonstrates the possibility of its own assertion (that is, it is a whole idea but formulated as a partial argument) and positions itself representatively in the larger argumentative frame of Schlegel’s theory of the fragment while also re-orienting any reading of AF 206. Precisely in this move does Schlegel differentiate his fragments from aphorisms, for these two particular fragments need not cease to communicate at the boundaries of their own semantic contents. Indeed, if one combines the two, the former takes on Schlegel’s characteristic shade of irony: one reading might assert that the “isolation” and “complet[ion]” of AF 206 are undermined by the relative incompletion of CF 14, but a more compelling reading might take Schlegel simply at his word, both with respect to the fragments as they are written and with respect to his assertion that “[p]hilosophy is the real homeland of irony, which one would like to define as logical beauty: for wherever philosophy appears in oral or written dialogues —and is not simply confined into rigid systems—there irony should be asked for and provided” (Schlegel 5 CF 42).

Instead of contradicting itself, the combination of AF 206 and CF 14 assures the reader that something in AF 206 is not what it appears to be. Immediately, the image of the “porcupine” stands out as suspect and seems to suggest a layer of meaning which is not immediately apparent. It is not illogical, but neither does it seem entirely proper to the philosophical register unless one considers it a manifestation of Schlegel’s call for irony in philosophy. What is suspicious in the figure of the porcupine is not its ineptitude to represent isolation and self-completion, but rather the inability of the porcupine as symbol to represent these concepts only, or even primarily. Something about this simile is insufficiently neutral. The porcupine is only seen as isolated insofar as its quills imply a particularly effective defense mechanism, thus presupposing not true isolation, but a resistance to the outside forces that assail it. The image of the porcupine is not one of isolation exactly, but rather one of unapproachability; it implies an outside subject with a desire to approach, but not the ability.

(16)

15

The proposition is, in a way, dialectical. It demands a synthesis of its thesis and antithesis: a porcupine is only complete in itself insofar as an outside agency fails to approach it, but that failure necessitates the relationship. Like the ironic utterance (or the Gestalt), the content of the simile is too rich for its own form (the image of the porcupine). But it is not merely this image which carries an ironic dimension in this way, for the fragment itself, in being bound by its own simile to the figure of the porcupine (“a fragment must be… like a porcupine”), must also be ironic in this same way. The Romantic fragment may be isolated in its presentation, but in that isolation its “meaning” is unapproachable. It is only ever approachable when it is posited as incomplete: when it is opened up to a system of meaning external to its proposition, only ever found in the interstices between fragments, where resides “wit.” And these interstices are provided for, and given content by, ironic opposition. Thus, the Romantic fragment is only precisely a fragment insofar as it is related to others like it through wit and this interrelation results in an ironic antithesis, but neither the utterance nor its ironic opposition comprehend the “true” function of the fragment. That is, it is a fragment so long as the true “meaning” of the system remains unsaid, as the synthesis of the opposing readings (the literal and the ironic). If this is the association which Schlegel aims at, it is one which must be left unspecified, as positive presentation is always subject to its own reversal. Incidentally, this makes direct criticism of the Romantic fragments rather difficult, since their precise meaning is never quite formulable, nor is the exact quality of their inter-relations.

Thus, each utterance can be ironically re-oriented to mean something new when combined with another fragment. This, then, is the rhetorical power of irony for Schlegel; it uses the negative19 (that which does not exist as an explicit form) to gesture toward the totality of what cannot be said positively (that which is given in an explicit form): that which cannot be contained in the symbol. Here, by symbol is meant a type of sign which “denotes by connoting,” as this was the first semiotic definition of the concept, given by Charles S. Peirce in the late 19th Century (Peirce). But as such the symbol is not merely a linguistic abridgement of an object in the world. Lacan, drawing the implications out of the concept, sees its limitation as its function—not its failure—as a linguistic object. Lacan writes, "A creature needs some reference to the beyond of language, to a pact…, a reference included in the general or, to be more exact, universal system of interhuman symbols” (Lacan 174). The idea here is that the symbol needs to be somewhat reductive in order to be graspable by all people (speaking a given language) as a part of this “pact” (a pact which irony attempts to evince as much as undermine). The symbolic, in restricting the predicative complex adhering to a signifier, binds its signifier

(17)

16

to a system of prescribed intercourse with language users which dictates usage and interpretation. It is, in essence, the more or less precise systemic value of its ideal, which makes that ideal current in the system of language. It is also, therefore, inherently social in meaning.

What is symbolic in Schlegel, then, is not so much the individual words he uses (though in the case of “porcupine” this could also be said), but the propositions put forward by the individual fragments. This is the case insofar as a proposition itself functions as the symbol for an idea: it is the (necessarily) incomplete predication which makes an idea graspable in everyday language. It is through these propositions that abstract concepts and ideas can be operated upon in a logical system; but, at the linguistic level, the inability of the symbol to be its concept creates a disjunction in which a logical challenge to the truth value of the proposition may be proposed, and Schlegel makes this challenge using irony. For while the symbol prescribes its own usage within a system, the ironic frees the language user from this system to the extent that it suggests nothing positively true, but merely evinces the falsehood or insufficiency of what is positively put forward, the slippage between the idea and its formulation in words. At the level of the porcupine this is hardly interesting, but at the level of the utterance the implications take on a more conceptual dimension. Schlegel’s fragments, being ironic when combined thus allow for literal readings, which operate on the level of the linguistic symbol, as well as ironic readings which evince the limitations of the truth of the symbol in its attempt at signification. The combination of these two levels of meaning gestures toward the limits that Schlegel and the other Romantics had perceived (whether rightly or wrongly) in classical art: its supposed attempt at mimesis.

Critically, the ironic dimension does not prevent AF 206 from meaning what it says. As Omar Calabrese writes, “for the fragment too there exists a form of excess that changes its nature: the fragment itself becomes a system whenever the assumption that it belongs to a system is renounced” (qtd. in Elias 171). If it is not referred to the collection at large, Schlegel’s fragment can certainly maintain its internal logic, however questionable that logic might be (the propositions remain at least internally coherent). However, it expresses itself fully only when it is taken as both independent of, and dependent upon, the “system.” It is the conjunction of self-sufficiency and relationality which helps to separate the “fragments” from the “aphorisms,” and to constitute the idea of wit in Schlegel’s writing, which he himself described as “absolute social feeling, or fragmentary genius” (Schlegel 2 CF 9). Rather than being mere pith, “wit,” for Schlegel, is the ability to establish analogies (in this case, between two or more of his fragments); these analogies serve to displace the contents of the fragments outside of

(18)

17

their internal symbolic logic and into a collective logic in which the meanings of their symbols are re-negotiated and often exposed as untenable (that is, too far removed from the logical presentation of their ideas), and thus taken to be ironic. Each fragment not only says what it says, but also contains the potential to signify its own opposition, and thus to signify beyond its own formal logic. Such a practice is intimately bound up with the impossibility of a perfect presentation of an idea.

Thus, wit is relatable to another Schlegelian term, “infinite perfectibility:” a reflection of the idea that “the universal can be achieved only in a manner that is each time singular” (Gasché xi) and thus that “[n]o sooner is the idea concretized by the singular work than both [ideal and reality] lie fragmented and, in their imperfection, require further completion” (Verstraete 29). Each combination of Schlegel’s fragments contains an understanding of the two constituting parts in ways that oscillate between their literal contents and the relativized meaning those contents take on in a more complex logical system. The irony serves to fill the gaps in positive interpretations by introducing the infinite negative of their opposition, which, in precisely the negativity of its presentation, posits the total idea as apprehensible while erasing all pretense of its comprehensibility20. Again, this idea arises partially from wit, and so it is important to note that wit means a deep understanding not only of the connection between two concepts (the possibility of their ingenious analogy), but also of the lack of necessity in any such paring, its absolute coincidence and yet guaranteed felicity (guaranteed because each symbol is redefined—that is, certain predicates are highlighted while others are obscured—by its re-contextualization).

This latter notion, the lack of necessity in any pairing of fragments, is both itself absolutely necessary to the success of Schlegel’s practice and absolutely disqualifying as a matter of systemic formality. For, a formal system (in the case of philosophy, a formalized logic) is defined by rules (axioms) rigidly governing the interactions of its parts, while Schlegel, instead, is attempting to simulate the infinite by creating a milieu of infinite potential. As a critical matter, this is somewhat problematic, because all critical theory must be positive and formal (that is, as a theory, it must make a claim, and then have a logical and consistent identification procedure and conceptual operation in order to test that claim on objects, concepts, etc.). It is precisely Schlegel’s informality (in the systemic sense) that has led to great difficulties in “theorizing” the fragment in a way which both applies a meaningfully rigorous understanding of the term and incorporates Schlegel’s usage (in both senses of “his usage of the term” and “his practice”).

(19)

18

For, formal systematicity seems to have been anathema to Schlegel’s project. The rules governing the interaction of parts in a formal system inherently limit the number and arrangement of said interactions, and thus also the possible derivable content of any such system. As a matter of text, then, the logical (or, even more limiting, causal) relations between two fragments as a matter of their signifier-level content limits the potential for interpretation, which irony, in its meta-linguistic dimension, opens up; but even more fundamentally, the logic of the form itself (“fragment” versus “whole”) defines an attitude toward the combinatory valency of a given utterance; while a Romantic fragment, for Schlegel, needn’t bear any necessary relationship to any other romantic fragment, and needn’t adhere to any strict guidelines of form or content (Luncinde, for instance, could be viewed as a novel-length Romantic fragment), it nonetheless could inform any number of other works insofar as the reader’s wit is capable of constructing the proper analogies; by contrast, the ancient poets were certainly attempting to use rigid forms to add a dimension of meaning to their texts, and thus it can be assumed that each piece (stanza, or word, or line, etc.) of an ancient text bears a necessary relationship to the surrounding matter, a contextualization which permits no change, at least as a matter of form. Schlegel critiques precisely this type of rigidity as an outmoded fact of ancient works in fragments like CF 60: “All the classical poetic genres have become ridiculous in their rigid purity” (Schlegel 8 CF 60). Schlegel struggles against this formal logic not necessarily as a matter of conceptual laxity (as Blanchot suggests), but because, as fragment 55 of his Ideas states, “Versatility consists not just in a comprehensive system but also in a feeling for the chaos outside that system…” (Schlegel 99 Ideas 55). This “chaos” can be glimpsed in irony.

iii

Given Schlegel’s early work on the ancients21, it seems fair to assume that his is a carefully considered position. Thus, further comment on Schlegel’s juxtaposition of classical against Romantic (“modern”) works seems necessary. Another oft-quoted fragment, AF 24, may aid in such an endeavor, as it addresses the dichotomy explicitly and has thus received a fair amount of critical attention; the fragment in question states: “Many of the works of the ancients have become fragments. Many modern works are fragments as soon as they are written” (Schlegel 21 AF 24). Upon reading this, two questions come immediately to mind:

(20)

19

first, “What makes fragmentation immanent in a modern work?”; and second, “What was so different about the ancient works?”. Firchow gives a rather illuminating interpretation:

“[A]s a consequence of its instinctuality or sense-orientation, Greek civilization was cyclical: it could and did achieve perfection, but only an instinctual perfection, limited and finite. Modern civilization, on the other hand, being controlled by reason, could and did err, because reason errs. Nonetheless, reason could by its very nature always find its way back to the right track, and therefore opened up the possibility of an eventual perfection without limits. But because this was a process or a kind of dialectic, no modern work of art was perfect, though every modern work of art was on the way to perfection” (Lucinde 13).

The (contentious) claim, then, is that while Greek civilization was essentially, to borrow Kant’s term, “intuitive” (that is, grounded in sensory experience), modern civilization works with reason, with pure concepts and understanding that can operate independent of the senses and conceive of transcendental ideas, but which, as a result, also acknowledge the impossibility of comprehending totality or presenting an idea as such. The essential point of this is not that the Greeks did not also have such abstract thought, which they clearly did; the point is that the Romantics, as moderns, were attempting to systematize not only the thoughts, but the abstraction itself, while acknowledging the imperfection and incompleteness of each level of systematicity. Thus, when raised to the level of the collection, or “system,” the fragment could not be a positive symbol (that is, it could not represent its own proposition as “true”), but only the symbol of the limitation of positivity itself (that is, it represented the failure of the proposition to symbolize the total content of the idea).

This helps to put the above fragment (AF 24) into context by positing two different types of fragmentation: a classical fragmentation that is incidental to the limited perfection of ancient works—a fragmentation that is posited on a purely material level—and a Romantic fragmentation that is posited on the level of ideality and which is essential to the project of Romantic literature. Ginette Verstraete expands upon this notion when she writes,

“For Schlegel, the sublime is inherent in art, which is not, as for Kant, an imitation of the purposelessness of nature—a universal ideal which the Greeks finalized—but an incomplete creation by a subject limited by its very interest in nature. This subjective appropriation of natural beauty implies a fragmentation of its ideal” (Verstraete 41).

Verstraete here adds to Firchow’s analysis the notion (widely supported) that Schlegel’s idea of fragmentation is a reaction to not only the limited, mimetic nature of classical art, but also to the Kantian understanding of the sublime, which, like irony for Schlegel, represented a gap

(21)

20

in the faculties of comprehension and apprehension, a gap of the same nature and magnitude as that between Schlegel’s fragments and their ironic grounds: the former being limited, the latter being infinite in its capacity.

While the nuances of Kant’s sublime must go undiscussed for brevity’s sake, it should hopefully be enough to quote one of his more succinct explanations here:

“…nothing that can be an object of the senses is to be called sublime. [What happens is that] our imagination strives to progress toward infinity, while our reason demands absolute totality as a real idea, and so [the imagination,] our power of estimating the magnitude of things in the world of sense, is inadequate to that idea” (Critique of Judgment 106)22_.

What for Kant was a matter of subjective aesthetic judgment, applicable only to objects which overwhelm the comprehending faculties, was for Schlegel inherent in all art: immanent, as it were, in the very concept of not only creating art, but of interpreting it in the age of reason. His attempt to incorporate irony into his writings as an analogue for the sublime experience hints at this understanding.

Of course, for Kant, “…nothing can be ascribed to the object except what the thinking subject takes out of itself…” (Critique or Pure Reason 113): that is, all judgments about perceptions originate within the subject, which conflicts with the idea that anything can be inherent in a work of art, thus contradicting Schlegel’s understanding of the sublime, at least if Verstraete’s interpretation is to be believed. However, if one assumes that this sublime quality is latent in every work of art only insofar as it is latent in the perceiving subject, the pressure is somewhat relieved, and an analogous notion (i.e., the notion that all judgments emanate from the subject) can be traced to provide an interesting insight into the nature of the classical fragment; for, if the judgment of the fragment’s fragmentary nature emanates from the subject (and thus does not inhere to the form itself), then this judgment cannot merely be grounded on the relationship of matter to itself (that is, we needn’t know as a matter of fact what a fragment’s original context was, nor whether it was ever “whole” as a matter of authorial intent, in order to make judgments about a piece as a fragment). Thus, notions of “the whole,” too, arise from the thinking subject rather than the piece itself. That is to say, an object is whole with respect to its subjective purposiveness: its “wholeness” is a matter of its apparent formal logic (that is, the logic of its form). This does not find any direct contradiction in Schlegel. Rather, if Schlegel asserts that the classical fragment is a fragment because it is a portion of a work which was initially whole by virtue of its (supposed) naïve mimetic intention, then it can be rationalized that the classical form is whole with regard to a particular systemic interpretation of the work,

(22)

21

which may or may not have had a purpose, but which nonetheless functioned insofar as it presented a form that was once recognizably subjectively purposive.

Schlegel’s Romantic fragmentation implies nothing about the relationship of matter to itself, but only about symbols to their ideals. Otabe Tanehisa describes Schlegel’s critical method thus:

“The activity of producing a correlation between the whole and the parts—that is, criticism in the Schlegelian sense—consists of two inseparable activities. First, based on an existing imperfect (i.e. fragmentary) whole, criticism imagines the ideal and perfect whole; secondly, anticipating this ideal whole, criticism realizes suitable parts” (Tanehisa 64).

In other words, the subjective purposiveness of a fragment allows for an imaginative reconstruction of the purpose, and the imagined purpose is presented (again inadequately) through another fragment of a different form. But the problems with this are immediately obvious; the movement Tanehisa is describing is merely the untenable attempt to fill in gaps in the representation of an idea by producing numerous inadequate presentations, the naivety of which Schlegel at least appears to have avoided, though he retains the essential negativity of the enterprise (that is, the acknowledged impossibility of the total presentation of an idea).

Other of Schlegel’s interpreters have understood this rumination on the relationship of semantic expression to ideas in a positive way (that is, as assuming the possibility of a whole in some sense). Gasché writes,

“All schematization23_{or exemplification of ideas produces only fragments. Conversely, fragments,}

strictly speaking, are then ideas in presentation. They are not leftover pieces of an integral whole, broken parts of a former or anticipated totality; they are that whole itself in actualitas…”

(Gasché xxvii, emphasis added).

But such a reading has a somewhat circular logic. If presenting ideas creates only fragments of those ideas, Gasché implies, then creating those fragments is presenting the idea. This posits the “subjective purposiveness” of the work (the subjective understanding of the object’s form as resultant from its concept) as sufficient grounds for recovering, in toto, an idea, an impossibility which does not live up to scrutiny. Rather, if Schlegel’s ironic writings function as fragments in any way, they do so by making fragmentation not just a fact of the presentation of an idea, but the idea itself (that is, he is presenting the idea of “fragmentation” qua se). To accomplish this, Schlegel proposes Romantic fragmentation as immanent in any art that understands itself as more than a naïve miming of nature because it is a “fragmentation” not of

(23)

22

the “real” (as with the classical fragment), nor of the “possible” (as the above quotes imply), but of the “virtual symbol,” in Žižek’s sense.

According to Žižek, this “virtual symbol” is in fact the (in)substantive, operative component to “the Lacanian ‘big Other,’ the virtual symbolic order, the network that structures reality for us” (Inside the Matrix); he clarifies, too, that such a symbol “in order to be operative…has to remain virtual…. If it’s fully actualized…it’s self destructive” (Wright). He constructs this notion of the “virtual symbol” by combing the aforementioned notion of the symbol (that which has its semantic entailments restricted to imply a certain system or convention of usage) with a Deleuzian notion of the virtual, which the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy sums thus: “The virtual is the condition for real experience, but it has no identity; identities of the subject and the object are products of processes that resolve… a differential field” (Smith). More simply, the virtual is that which is efficacious because it is an idea with possible presentations which remain unactualized; for, such actualization limits the potential modes of intercourse with the idea by concretizing that idea into a reality (which, as the above encyclopedia entry acknowledges in another passage, is an idea that draws heavily on Kant). The real power of Žižek’s notion is merely the confluence of these two ideas; the “virtual symbol” is a symbol (that is, something with a prescriptive system of intercourse with respect to interpreting subjects) that functions virtually (that is, which remains effective only so long as it remains unactualized).

The key difference between the possible and the virtual symbol, then, is that the actualization of a particular presentation of the infinite set of possible presentations of an idea is not mutually exclusive with the efficacy of that possibility. That is, presenting an idea one way does not really affect the idea (the subjective purposiveness does not alter the purpose), nor does it mean that one cannot also then present this idea in another way. The particular presentation still functions as representative of the ideal, and one can understand the presentation in light of the same principles with which one approaches the idea it presents; (as a rough example, a depiction of an angel, such as Klee’s “Angelus Novus,” can be interpreted against the idea of an angel, and perhaps the former cannot possibly encompass all associations with the latter—that is, it will not be adequate to the concept—but the presentation does not, in any case, affect the system of rituals associated with the idea of angels). When critics then suggest that Schlegel’s fragments operate in this way, as Gasché and Tanehisa do, they not only make the project naïve, they utterly ignore the meaning-creating potential of the irony at work in its negative dimension.

(24)

23

By contrast, the virtual symbol is mutually exclusive with the actualization thereof. It is the function of the virtual symbol to signify something which does not exist but which nonetheless has reality insofar as it exerts a systemic influence as though it were actual. But any actualization of the virtual symbol would immediately undermine the system in which its virtual counterpart functions. Again, drawing on the example of the angel, an actual angel would undermine the system of intercourse that has grown up around the symbol of the angel, insofar as that system is predicated on belief, which fundamentally demands the absence of its object24 (i.e. one interacts differently with something empirically confirmed and sensible than with something merely speculative). Another example of a virtual symbol would be “infinity,” for in its very presentation (in a symbol, or a word, or a work of art) the concept is limited to a form, when what it describes must be boundless. Presentation undermines the concept and changes the nature of the subjective purposive act. In fact, there is no truly subjective purposive interaction with the virtual, since there is no mediate object, but only the purpose or symbol itself. What Schlegel does by adding the ironic dimension is first to re-create the subjective purposive act in the moment of positive interpretation and then to gesture toward the impossibility of such an act with respect to the ideal hinted at, but never presented (actualized), in the “true” content of the fragment, namely, its ironic implication.

Schlegel, in understanding the impossibility of the adequate presentation of an idea, favors not the naïve task of presenting possible purposive symbols of that idea (as Tanehisa suggests), nor do his fragments themselves purport to realize a purpose (as Gasché seems to suggest); rather, since his fragments are unable totally to circumvent their subjective purposiveness, they make this purposiveness the purpose itself by offering both the fragment to be interpreted as figure and the infinite ground of the ironic unsaid against which to interpret its imperfect, finite character. Schlegel thus circumvents the limitations of formal presentation by presenting action: the interpreting subject’s action of reducing the idea to a finite understanding. This is the “performative” dimension of Schlegel’s fragmenting project: he does not write about fragments, nor does he write fragments as such, but he makes the reading subject aware of his or her own fragmenting of the ideal in interpreting (with subjective purposiveness) a piece of art (in Schlegel’s case, writing).

Thus, Schlegel’s fragments don’t explicate fragmentation as a concept, but perform it as a phenomenon: in his words, he manages “to have a system, and to have none” (AF 53). Rather than making logically defensible claims that support and evince one another, Schlegel’s fragments are ironic refractions of ideas that are contained only in the disjunctions between

(25)

24

one or more fragments, while the individual fragments themselves remain self-contained, certainly, but insufficiently described when removed from their context, as an ironic utterance is often unrecognizably ironic when removed from the context that evinces it as such.

But this system has another, perhaps unintended, consequence as a matter of its claim to fragmentariness. For, employing the same terminology to describe both “real” fragments and “virtual symbolic” fragments (that is, classical and Romantic “fragments” respectively) obscures the real violence done to classically fragmented texts, suggesting that this is tantamount to virtual incompletion, which, for its part, actually preserves the possibility (however “messianic”) of a certain mode of comprehending the symbol rather than destroying the very possibility of comprehension (at least with respect to the objects original form). Still, the comparison does also evince some other important differences that may elsewise have remained obscure.

iv

Schlegel’s writing seems to suggest that, in being manifest, that is, in signifying something particular, works of art are detached from some fundamental aspect of the logic of the ideas they claim to present, not because the idea is the unutterable commonality at the seams of the amalgamation of all the infinite possible presentations thereof, but because, more fundamentally, the logic of dealing with what is said is mutually exclusive to the logic of dealing with what is unsaid. And to concretize this, Schlegel introduces irony, wherein what is said elicits the response first of dealing with it as such, and then of dealing with it as that which is not said.

This disparity in modes of cognition between the said and the unsaid sheds more light on the Schlegelian dichotomy of classical and Romantic fragments by helping to answer the question: “What is the functional difference between a Romantic and a classical fragment?”: that is, why is it necessary for Schlegel to create a new type of fragment, rather than simply analyzing classical fragments in a literary-theoretical way in order to deduce something about art and the “modern” orientation towards it? In brief, where is the classical fragment really deficient as a fragment? Gasché suggests the following:

“A piece struck by incompletion, a detached piece, a piece left over from a broken whole, or even an erratic piece, is structurally linked with the whole or totality of which it would have been, or of

(26)

25

which it has been, a part. Such a fragment is a piece of an ensemble, possible or constituted at one point. It receives its very meaning from that ensemble that it thus posits and presupposes rather than challenges” (Gasché vii).

Gasché suggests that the main function of the Romantic fragment is to challenge the concept of a whole, which, to some extent, is correct. But it is not that the Romantic fragment does this in a vacuum. It requires a reader to interpret it in a very particular way, a way configurationally precluded by the classical fragment.

It may then be suggested that the simplest way to rationalize the inadequacy of the classical fragment to the Romantic task is to understand the Romantic task as related to the aforementioned disjunction between systems of dealing with what is said and what is unsaid. What the classical fragment necessarily has that the Romantic fragment does not is (paradoxically) manifest lack. Thus, one is free to disregard the imperfection of the presentation of the idea in a classical fragment precisely because the text itself has lost material the nature of which can be posited as anything and everything. And indeed, it is possible that the imaginative supposition of the potential content—as merely “potential content” and not specific content—of a damaged piece better reflects, in its generality, the nature of an (aesthetic) idea as unsayable (inasmuch as it is “perfect”) than could any manifest content. However, it is precisely the fact that the unsaid in the classical fragment is a feature incidental to its form as a poem but necessary to its form as a fragment that justifies the reader’s engagement with what is unsaid (lost) using the same system of reason as (s)he might use to approach what is said; that is, both are, to some extent, posited as positive content with incidental lack, not a piece which exhibits an inherent conceptual lack, presenting said lack only negatively: as configurationally impossible. Thus, the inadequacy of the classical fragment, for Schlegel, isn’t just its failure to challenge totality; it is the necessity of dealing with the said and unsaid in the same way (that is, as part and parcel of the same logical frame), which allows a reader to confront the fragment without the understanding of its necessary inadequacy (rather than merely incidental inadequacy) that distinguishes the classical fragment from the Romantic fragment which, by contrast, is supposed to evince this very necessity through its simultaneously complete and yet imperfect (ironic) logical form.

To make this clear, an illustration may be in order, but since such an illustration requires a demonstrable disjunction between a whole and a fragment thereof it would be difficult to draw on succinct examples from the true classical fragments. Thus, a short (and infamous) example from modern literature will here suffice: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”25_In

(27)

26

several ways this text could itself be said to be a “fragment.” At the very least, it is a sentence fragment. However, it is worth acknowledging that “For sale: baby shoes, never worn” and “For sale: baby shoes,____worn” have strikingly different internal logics, and a reading subject, while using the same system of linguistic decoding to approach both, nonetheless comprehends the two very differently. This is because in the former case any given meaning can be understood by the reader that generates it as inhering to the total logic of the text (i.e. it is a “subjective purposiveness” that understands itself as having contemplated the object through the logic of its form), while in the latter case, due to the signified lack (signified, that is, by the underscored gap), any generated meaning must be understood as merely provisional, and the total logic of the text acknowledged as irrecoverably lost26 (though speculatively possible). This is to say that a fragment is configurationally incomplete because any interpretation of it, however coherent in itself, must understand itself as fundamentally different from the interpretation of the fully described system, in the same way that the Venus de Milo can be understood perfectly well for the sculpture it is, but one nonetheless understands that a pair of arms would elicit a different intuition of the statue. The “body language” of the arms could not help but add meaning to the form, but also the purposiveness without purpose of the total “human” sculpture would become evident with the addition.

It is again important to note how this notion of positive versus negative lack applies to Schlegel’s Romantic fragments, and the complementary classical textual fragments. The difference lies in the Kantian distinction between a concept and an intuition, as the former represents a generality (i.e. the generality of conceptual deficiency) while the latter represents something specific (i.e. the perception of a specific fragmentation of a specific object in the world). For Kant, the concept is that which can be thought independent of sensory experience, while the intuition is related to the sensible experience of the world (it is a fact of perception before “cognition” as such). Thus, the concept of a fragment does not bear the distinct characteristics of the particular violence that has separated a fragment from its respective whole; rather, the concept contains only a general understanding of this fact that is necessarily absent of quality. It is precisely this generality, lacking positive qualities, which is the issue. What is an affirmative (positive), singular judgment about the fragmentation of an object of sensible intuition is a negative, universal judgment in the concept itself. That is, in lieu of the requisite substantial relationship to definite systems of logic which have been lost, the concept of fragmentation can posit only the concept of lack, which, precisely because it inheres to the concept of fragmentation a priori, cannot fundamentally reconfigure the logical interpretation

Fragments. A Mass. A Plan.

FRAGMENTS. A MASS.

A PLAN.

Contents

Introduction:

Chapter 1